This introductory critical survey course will explore a variety of theatre and performance traditions from around the globe, from antiquity to the present day. Through close analysis of select texts and performance practices in a seminar format, the course will consider what role theatre plays in the establishment and growth of culture, politics, and aesthetics. Topics may include: Ancient Greek theatre, Classical Indian performance, Renaissance English theatre, Japanese Noh and Kabuki, popular American traditions, modern European theatre, and postmodern performance. Films and other media will be utilized when relevant. Regular in-class visits to the Williams College Museum of Art will occur, as well. This course meets the criteria of the Exploring Diversity Initiative as it engages in a cross-cultural investigation of performance and explores how theatre is deeply embedded in power relations. [ more ]

In the first book of Vergil's Aeneid, the god Jupiter prophesies the foundation and the greatness of Rome: "I place no limits on their fortunes and no time; I grant them empire without end." Yet elsewhere in this epic account of Rome's origins, this promise of unlimited power for the descendants of Romulus seems to be seriously abridged. Some readers have seen, not only in the Aeneid but throughout classical Roman literature, a persistent tendency to inscribe the decay and disintegration of Roman power into the very works that proclaim and celebrate Roman preeminence. This course explores the ancient Romans' own interpretations of their past, their present, and their destiny: the humble beginnings of their city, its rise to supreme world power, and premonitions of its decline. Related topics for our consideration will include Roman constructions of gender, the location and expression of virtue in public and private spheres, the connections and conflicts between moral probity and political success, the exercise of individual power versus action on behalf of the commonwealth, the absorption of foreign customs and peoples into Rome, the management of literal and imaginary frontiers, and other anxieties of empire. We will read selections and complete works by a wide variety of Roman authors, including Cicero, Catullus, Caesar, Vergil, Sallust, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, and Tacitus. All readings will be in translation. [ more ]

Comparative literature involves reading and analyzing literature that represents different times, movements, cultures, and media. In this class, we will study English translations of texts from eras spanning the ancient to the contemporary; literary movements including Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism; national traditions arising in Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America; and media including prose fiction, the graphic novel, and film. Throughout the course, we will consider what it means to think about all these different works as literary texts. To help with this, we will also read selections of literary theory that defines literature and its goal in abstract or philosophical terms. Assignments will focus on close reading of relatively short texts by authors such as Cervantes, Garcia Marquez, Kleist, Tolstoy, Maupassant, Satrapi, Wilde, Shklovsky, Bakhtin, and Foucault. All readings will be in English. [ more ]

In this course, we will read first-rate fiction by first-rate writers from a wide variety of traditions and eras in an effort to understand the meaning of narrative. How does narrative technique shape our understanding of a given text? In what ways and for what purposes do authors create different narrators to present a story? Why do we often read and write similar kinds of tales, and what does this repetition do for us? Our readings will include works by Maupassant, Dinesen, Tanizaki, Tolstoy, Premchand, and Cortazar. We will also consider some pertinent theoretical pieces. All readings in English. [ more ]

This course has a clear purpose. If you had signed up for a course in biology, you would know that you were about to embark on the systematic study of living organisms. If you were registered for a course on the American Civil War, you would know that there had been an armed conflict between the northern and southern states in the 1860s. But if you decide you want to study "culture," what exactly is it that you are studying? The aim of this course is not to come up with handy and reassuring definitions for this word, but to show you why it is so hard to come up with such definitions. People fight about what the word "culture" means, and our main business will be to get an overview of that conceptual brawl. We will pay special attention to the conflict between those thinkers who see culture as a realm of freedom or equality or independence or critical thought and those thinkers who see culture as a special form of bondage, a prison without walls. The course will be organized around short theoretical readings by authors ranging from Matthew Arnold to Constance Penley, but we will also, in order to put our new ideas to the test, watch several films (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Silence of the Lambs, The Lord of the Rings) and listen to a lot of rock & roll. Why do you think culture matters? Once you stop to pose that question, there's no turning back. [ more ]

This course will examine ways in which literary works reflect on their status as texts. We'll look at the formal pleasures and puzzles generated by techniques including frame narratives, recursion, and self-reference, in novels, films, and stories by Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka, Kelly Link, Michel Gondry, Paul Park, and others. Ultimately, we will use the study of metafiction to focus a larger inquiry into the socializing force of language and self-consciousness in human development. Note that students will be required to use, as well as interpret, metafictional techniques in much of their assigned writing. [ more ]

Taking its title from the Wallace Stevens poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," which interprets the blackbird in different ways, this course similarly explores a more complex, multi-layered perspective on jazz, from jazz and American democracy to jazz in visual art. Accordingly, the course introduces students to several genres, including historical documents, cultural criticism, music, literature, film, photography and art. The course does not draw on a musicological method but rather a socio-cultural analysis of the concept, music and its effect--so students are not required to have any prior musical knowledge or ability. In this writing intensive course, students will write short close analyses of multiple types of media, ultimately building up to an argumentative essay. This EDI course explores the musical expressions of the culturally diverse peoples of African descent in the New World, as well as the myriad ways in which representations of jazz signify on institutional power, reaffirm dominant U.S. and/or European hierarchies of race, gender and class, and signal inequality in order to contest it. [ more ]

Whether despite or precisely because of the enormous historical and political turbulence in twentieth-century Russia, the intensity of its cultural life was equally unprecedented. Over the period of nearly seventy years, Russian literature went through a number of major stages that defined its poetics and ideology: the Silver Age and its decline; the Revolution, the Civil War and the rise of Socialist Realism as the official literary method; the exodus of Russian writers abroad in the 1920s; the birth of a new proletarian type, worshiped by Soviet authors and mocked by the anti-Soviet ones; the Second World War; the Thaw and de-Stalinization, when the Gulag seemed to have floated to the surface; another wave of tightening of the regime during the "stagnation period," the dissident movement and the Cold War; another mass emigration to Europe, Israel and the U.S.; and finally -- the dissolution of the Soviet empire and the rise of Russian postmodernism. As we discuss these and other topics of twentieth-century Russian culture, we will find ourselves immersed into the mechanisms of literary humor and comicality (e.g., in Mikhail Zoshchenko's short stories and Ilf and Petrov's picaresque novel The Twelve Chairs), the elements of the supernatural (in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita), the ways of how Russian writers portray urban space (e.g., Moscow, in Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow to the End of the Line), and how Soviet history is reinvented when censorship is replaced with market economy (in Viktor Pelevin's Generation P). Literary texts will be supplemented with occasional film screenings. All readings and discussions are in English. [ more ]

The Book of Job has often been described as the most philosophical book of the Hebrew Bible. The story of one man's struggle to understand the cause of his suffering and his relationship to God represents the finest flowering of the Near Eastern wisdom literature tradition. Through its exploration of fundamental issues concerning human suffering, fate and divinity, and the nature of philosophical self-examination, Job has served as a touchstone for the entire history of existential literature. At the same time, the sheer poetic force of the story has inspired some of the greatest artistic and literary meditations in the Western tradition. This course will engage in a close reading of the Book of Job in its full cultural, religious, and historical context with special attention to its literary, philosophical, and psychological dimensions. We will then proceed to investigate key modern works in several genres that involve Joban motifs, themes, and text both explicitly and implicitly. These texts will include Franz Kafka's The Trial, Archibald MacLeish's J.B., Robert Frost's "Masque of Reason," Carl Jung's Answer to Job, and William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job. All readings are in translation. [ more ]

Carnival is a regenerative festival as well as a transgressive one. It is a time for upheavals and recreating for one day, a new world order. Men dress as women, women dress as men, the poor become kings; drink and sex and outrageous behavior is sanctioned. We will look at festivals in such places as New Orleans, Venice, and Rio. Central to this course are the cultural and religious lives of these societies, and how these festivals exist politically in a modern world as theatre and adult play. A variety of sources will be used, such as newspaper accounts, films, photography, personal memoirs and essays on the subject. [ more ]

In this course we will focus on issues of language and identity in the contemporary lived experience of various U.S. Latina/o communities. We will ask: How are cultural values and material conditions expressed through Latina/o linguistic practices? How do Latina/o identities challenge traditional notions of the relationship between language, culture, and nation? In what ways might Latina/o linguistic practices serve as tools for social change? Building on a discussion of issues such as Standard American English, code-switching (popularly known as "Spanglish"), and Latina/o English, we will also examine bilingual education, recent linguistic legislation, and the English Only movement. We will survey texts taken from a variety of (inter)disciplines, including sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics, literature, and education. Both directly and/or indirectly, these works address Latina/o language politics, as well as the broader themes of power, community, ethno-racial identity, gender, sexuality, class, and hybridity. [ more ]

What were the religious and cultural landscapes in which Christianity emerged? How did inhabitants of the ancient Mediterranean world speak about the concept and significance of religion? How have scholars of early Christianity answered these questions? What are the implications of their various readings of early Christian history? In the first half of this course, we shall address these questions by examining the formation of Christianity from its origins as a Jewish movement until its legalization, using a comparative socio-historical approach. In the second half of the course, we shall examine the earliest literature produced by the Jesus movement and consider it within a comparative framework developed in the first half of the course. [ more ]

Arabs have been a part of the tapestry of the United States since the early 19th century. As immigrants to the new world, the identity of this community has largely been defined by changing American understandings of race, ethnicity, and religion. The in-betweenness of this minority group--not exactly white or black, claiming Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths--and the often contradictory nature of U.S. involvement in the region, has only further confounded Americans in their understanding of this diverse community. This course will use an interdisciplinary approach to explore the rich histories, representations, and cultural production of this American minority group. For the purposes of this survey, we will also consider the narratives of other Muslim minority groups (i.e., Iranians, Pakistanis, Indians, and African American Muslims) within the scope of the Arab American experience. We will look at poems and stories from Arab immigrants in the early to mid 20th century (e.g., the Mahjar poets) and consider, in the context of these writings, issues of xenophobia, assimilation, linguistic, and cultural difference, and Arab American identity in the context of other ethnic groups. Throughout this course we will continue to think about how changing U.S. geo-political interests in the region alter perceptions of Arabs and Muslims in our midst (considering, for example, the 1979 Revolution in Iran and the subsequent hostage crisis, the two Gulf Wars, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 9/11, Afghanistan, the War on Terror, and Guantanamo). In addition, we will examine representations of this minority and Islam more generally in the media and popular culture (print and broadcast journalism, films, cartoons, popular songs, and videos), as well as Arab cultural forms that seek to self-narrate the Arab experience for an American viewer. At the heart of this course is a desire to not only shed light on what it means to be an Arab or a Muslim or an immigrant, but also to understand the multiple ways in which we conceptualize and seek to define what it means to be American. [ more ]

An introduction to film analysis, focusing on features produced by Hollywood studios from the 1930s to the present. Our emphasis will be on film genres, and on the formal properties of film as a medium for telling stories. We will also consider the industrial organization of film production and the intersection of economics and popular culture. Students will be required to attend screenings of one and sometimes two films weekly, by directors including Welles, Hitchcock, Coppola, and Jonze. Critical readings will be assigned. [ more ]

Why do the peoples and cultures of Latin America and the Middle East often elicit such passionate responses in the United States and Europe? Some feel threatened, while others are intrigued, but responses to these world regions are seldom neutral. Often seen as exotic and erotic, or as a danger to the way of life of Americans and Europeans, Islam, Arabs and Latin Americans are at the forefront of socio-political debates in the United States and Europe. The origins of this world-view are historical, but are also heavily influenced by contemporary immigration and international affairs. After characterizing Islam as the greatest contemporary threat to "Western" civilization in his infamous essay titled "The Clash of Civilizations," Samuel Huntington subsequently found it necessary to focus on Latinos as the most significant threat to American civilization. By examining literature and film from the Middle East and Latin America, and from these immigrant communities in the United States and Europe, we will go beyond superficial images and inflammatory rhetoric to explore the cultures behind the passions. Among other things, the texts of this course examine the ties between the Arab world and Latin America, and between these two regions and their neighbors to the north. At the heart of this course are the ideas of borders and margins. What does it mean to cross borders or to live on the margins of society? The borders we will discuss will be geographic borders, but also cultural borders that will permit the exploration of the territories between life and death, civilization and barbarism, wealth and poverty, war and peace and other dichotomies that some employ to classify the world but that rarely allow for human sensibilities and the subtle experiences of being. Our texts may include works by writers such as Alurista, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Gloria Anzaldua, Juan Rulfo, Clarice Lispector, Milton Hatoum, Taher Ben Jelloun, Mohamad Choukri, Mahmoud Darwish, Laila Lalami and Tayyib Saleh that treat the human condition at the borders/margins of society. Films may include El Norte, La Mision, Pixote,Midaq Alley, City of God,, Battle of Algiers, My Beautiful Launderette, Crash, Hate and Head On. There will also be a course reader that includes theoretical material on orientalism, tropicalism, nationalism and transnationalism. All readings are in English translation and films have English subtitles. [ more ]

Poetry was the dominant form of literature in China for most of the pre-modern period. It could be used to justify the overthrow of dynasties or to court a beloved; Chinese poets sang about communing with the gods and about brewing ale, sometimes in the same poem. In this course we will read and discuss poems from the first 2000 years of the Chinese literary tradition. Some of the issues we will explore include the ways in which poems present the world and make arguments about it; how Chinese poets construct different notions of the self through their poems; and how poetry can give voice to conflicts between aesthetics and morality, between the self and the community, and between the state and other sources of social capital. We will also look at Chinese theories of literature and poetry and compare them with dominant Western models. This is an EDI course and we will be concerned throughout with differences in the way Chinese and other cultures thought about and utilized poetry. We will examine the implicit biases inherent in the ways Western scholars in particular have analyzed and translated Chinese poetry. All readings in English translation. [ more ]

In this course we will study prominent texts and authors of the modern Arab world. The range of genres and themes of this literature is vast. In particular, we will analyze the debates around modernity and the importance given to social engagement in these texts. Our readings include works by authors that have received some notoriety outside of the Arab world such as Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988. We will also read the Iraqi poets Nazik al-Malaika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Palestinians Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, and Tayyib Salih from the Sudan. Included in our readings are the famous autobiography by the Moroccan Muhammad Shukri as well as women's literature by Hanan al-Sheikh, Huda Barakat and Nawal Sadawi. All readings are in English. This literature course fulfils the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative (EDI), as it engages the Arab world from a humanistic perspective that aims to promote cultural awareness. A fundamental goal of the course is to engage the diversity of approaches to sexuality, religion, gender and politics that are so prominent in contemporary literature from the Arab world. [ more ]

This course will introduce students to the history, literature, and artistic culture of premodern Japan, from the time of the first recorded histories in the 800s through the abolition of the samurai class in the late 1800s. We will focus on the politics and aesthetic culture of the ruling elites in each period, from the heyday of the imperial court through the rise and eventual decline of the samurai warrior and the growth of Edo (Tokyo), with its new mode of early modern government and new forms of literature, theater, and art. Team taught by faculty from History and Comparative Literature, the course will examine historical texts alongside works drawn from literature, visual culture, and performing arts, and will ask students to consider how these different kinds of texts can shed light on one another. What is the difference between reading history and reading literature, or is it even meaningful to distinguish the two? By critically engaging in various kinds of textual analysis, this EDI course not only considers the relationship between politics, culture, and society in premodern Japan but also explores how we can attempt to know and understand different times and places. Primary texts will include court diaries, war tales, and fiction; laws and edicts; essays and autobiographies; noh, kabuki, and puppet theater; and tea ceremony, visual art, and architecture. Students should register under the prefix specific to the Division in which they want to receive credit. [ more ]

In one definition, postmodernism in art and literature is what you get when you combine modernism's radical experimentation with pop culture's easy appeal. This term has been used to describe works from Andy Warhol's paintings of Campbell's soup cans and Jean Baudrillard's critical essays on Disneyland to Thomas Pynchon's paranoid novel about postal conspiracy, The Crying of Lot 49. Theorists of the postmodern have argued that it represents not only a radical change in aesthetic sensibilities, but a fundamentally new relationship between art, language, and society. In this tutorial, we will read some of the most important theoretical essays defining the postmodern (essays which themselves often embrace this playful and sometimes ironic style), and we will pair them with artistic texts that are said to illustrate the features of postmodernism. The latter will be mainly novels and short stories from various countries, but one feature of this theory is a flattening of the distinction between high and low culture as well as between the written and the visual, so we will also examine examples from architecture, visual art, and/or broader pop culture. Along the way will ask whether global theoretical paradigms like postmodernism can help us understand other cultures better (by locating them within a single universal system), or whether this approach conceals important cultural differences. Texts will include essays by Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others; novels and short stories by writers like Don DeLillo, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, and Murakami Haruki; painting and sculpture associated with Pop Art and Superflat; the architecture of Williamstown area museums; etc. Writing assignments will focus on reading the theoretical texts critically and applying their ideas to the artistic texts in creative and interesting ways. Open to sophomores as well as advanced students. Emphasis will be on understanding and engaging the criticism that we read, and comparing the critical and fictional texts creatively in a way that sheds light on both. [ more ]

In this course we will examine the rich, complex and diverse texts of Classical Arabic Literature. The readings include works that have achieved notoriety outside of the Arab world (such as the Quran and One Thousand and One Nights) as well as works by authors largely unknown outside of the Arab world but canonical in Arabic-language culture such as Imru al-Qays, al-Jahiz, al-Ma'arri, Abu Nuwas, al-Hallaj, al-Ghazali and al-Mutannabi. Women's literature in this course includes works by al-Khansa', known for her elegies, and by Wallada bint al-Mustakfi of Cordoba, who contributed to the courtly love poetry of both Europe and the Arab world. Topics for discussion include theological and philosophical queries, erotica, wine, bibliomania and avarice. Our primary texts represent such varied regions as the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, Abbasid Baghdad, North Africa and Islamic Spain. Chronologically, the texts range from the sixth century CE to the fourteenth century. All readings are in English. [ more ]

For as long as modern Russian literature has existed, incarceration has consistently been one of its central themes. In the nineteenth century, Dostoevsky described the prison world he got to know first-hand as "a world apart, unlike everything else, with laws of its own, its own dress, its own manners and customs" (The House of the Dead). However, it was not until the October Revolution and Stalin's purges of the 1930-1950s that political imprisonment became so firmly engraved onto these dark pages of Russian history that it formed a separate genre: Gulag memoirs. This course explores the representations of prison and hard-labor camp experience in Russian literature and culture across different artistic forms and media (folklore and songs, poetry, fiction, memoirs, diaries, personal correspondence, film, drawings, craftwork, and criminal tattoos). By looking at different aspects of life in the Soviet Gulag through the lens of a variety of first-hand accounts, students will be encouraged to compare the Gulag's legacy to other historical and geographical contexts from around the world (for example, to Holocaust memoirs or Latin American narratives of the "disappeared") and to think more broadly about prison as a semiotic space, and about imprisonment --as an existential experience. Throughout the seminar, we will address the function of art as a means of survival and analyze what permutations our life's key concepts and dichotomies undergo in a world behind bars. All readings and discussions will be in English. [ more ]

The celebration of "courtly love" by medieval and Renaissance writers institutionalized the notion of the desiring male subject and the desired female object that continues to reverberate in contemporary culture. But early writers do not always, or even usually, endorse these positions uncritically, and even works that celebrate heterosexual love devote surprisingly large spaces to other kinds of desire. The Lover in the Romance of the Rose seeks to win the Rose, but it is the male God of Love he kisses on the mouth. Shakespeare's As You Like It and Twelfth Night end in multiple marriages, but the plots revolve around cross-dressing and gender confusion. We will supplement literary readings with both medieval and contemporary theoretical texts. The aim of the course is to sharpen critical reading and writing skills across a broad range of literary forms and historical, cultural and aesthetic values. As part of the Exploring Diversity Initiative, this course focuses on varieties of sexual desire in major pre- and early-modern works, and the challenges they offer to our own contemporary values and assumptions. [ more ]

In this course we will debate the nature of literary meaning and explore the engagement of literature, theory, and culture. In thefirst half of the course we will explore such questions as, What determines the meaning of a text? Can an interpretation of a literary work be deemed true or false? In the second half of the course, we will read works by such authors as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butlerand as we investigate therole of art in the construction and transformation of political subjectivities. The emphasis will be on exploring anddefending arguments on the issues in productive discussion and frequent short papers. [ more ]

Focusing on first-person accounts of LGBTQ sexualities, this course examines how changing social and political realities have affected sexual desires and identities, and how individuals represent their experiences of these historical and conceptual shifts. How do these representations of sexuality challenge prevailing ideas about desire and identity? How do they navigate the gender limitations imposed by our language? How do other social identifications, such as race, ethnicity, class, and gender, shape these experiences of sexuality? We will read memoirs, autobiographies, and personal essays that reflect a range of LGBTQ identities and experiences, including works by Martin Duberman, Audre Lorde, Leslie Feinberg, Alison Bechdel, Reinaldo Arenas, Kate Bornstein, Gloria Anzaldua, Samuel Delany, David Wojnarowicz, and Michelle Tea. These narratives will be accompanied by a variety of queer and feminist theories of sexuality, some of which interrogate the historical and conceptual limitations of "experience" and "identity." This course fulfills the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it investigates institutions of power and privilege as they have impacted LGBTQ communities, emphasizes empathetic understanding of gender and sexual diversity, and focuses on critical theorization of intersecting differences and identities. [ more ]

This course examines the cinematic portrayal of revolution, civil war, and nationalist struggles in the Middle East. We will look at how Arab directors have interpreted liberation struggles and nationalist revolutions to include broader cinematic discourses on culture, gender, social conflict, and national identity. In addition, we will consider whether Arab films wrestling with recent history may be viewed as harbingers of the upheaval and optimism brought on by the Arab Spring. In covering such rich ground, this course seeks to provide students with a critical introduction to the language of film while presenting a social and historical context to the major conflicts in the region in the past half-century. We will cover feature film production, documentaries, short films, and digital media. While students will view films from across the region, special emphasis will be given to films pertaining to the Egyptian Revolution. Filmmakers include Yousry Nasrallah, Ibrahim El Batout (Egypt); Moufida Tlatli (Tunisia); Ziad Douerie and Nadine Labaki (Lebanon); Elia Sulieman and Michel Khaleifi (Palestine). The course will highlight many of the amateur digital videos that have been instrumental in exposing both the brutalities of the repressive regimes and the triumphs of the mass mobilizations against them. Class will be conducted in English. [ more ]

A survey of major trends in playwriting and performance practice from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. We will read major playwrights from a variety of national traditions, always considering their works in the context of evolutionary and revolutionary transformations of theatre practice. Artists and movements may include Realism and Naturalism (Stanislavsky, Antoine, Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shaw), the Epic Theatre (Brecht, Piscator), The Theatre of Cruelty (Artaud), the "Absurd," (Beckett, Genet, Pinter) the collectivist avant-garde (Grotowski, Living Theatre, Open Theatre), and more recent playwriting. [ more ]

In this tutorial, we will read four novels written between 1850 and 1900, all of which focus on the figure of the adulteress: Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), Lev Tolstoy's Anna Karenina (1873-77), Leopoldo Alas y Ure?a's La Regenta (1884-85), and Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest (1894). For each week of class, students will read one of these primary texts, as well as a selection of secondary literature that will allow us to understand, over the course of the semester, how and why the adulteress played a key role in the cultural imagination of Europe during this time. All works will be read in English translation. [ more ]

One of the two most consequential texts in human history, the Qur'an is more conscious of itself as text and the work of interpretation that is part of the life of a text. Because it is God's most important sign (and also because it is relatively short) millions have memorized it and the art of Qur'anic recitation is one of the supreme Islamic performing arts. Nevertheless it is primarily as a text that the Qur'an exists in itself and in the minds of Muslims. The text of the Qur'an will thus be the focus of this course, reading it extensively, intensively and repeatedly throughout the semester. We will attend to the structure and variety of styles and topics in the text and to the Qur'an's understanding of itself in relation to other forms of literary expression. We will place the form and content in the context of seventh century c.e. Arab society and attend to the life of the Prophet (PBUH) that provides one crucial framework to the text. Through the lens of tafsir, Qur'anic commentary, we will also use the text to give an initial survey of some of the main theological, philosophical, mystical and legal developments in the Islamic tradition. Finally we will explore some of the aspects of the place of the text in the life of Muslims, including the development of calligraphy and recitation. [ more ]

From the endemic warfare of the medieval era to the atomic bombing and the violent explosion of technology in the last century, the end of the world is an idea which has occupied a central place in almost every generation of Japanese literature. Paradoxically, the spectacle of destruction has given birth to some of the most beautiful, most moving, and most powerfully thrilling literature in the Japanese tradition. Texts may be drawn from medieval war narratives like The Tale of the Heike; World War II fiction and films by Ibuse Masuji, Imamura Shohei, and Ichikawa Kon; fantasy and science fiction novels by Abe Kobo, Murakami Haruki and Murakami Ryu; and apocalyptic comics and animation by Oshii Mamoru, Otomo Katsuhiro, and others. The class and the readings are in English; no familiarity with Japanese language or culture is required. [ more ]

This course explores the fluidity of genres by focusing on tragedy and comedy. Each began as a grafted thing, a hybrid, a fusion of poetic, musical and dance genres previously developed for a variety of occasions outside the Theater of Dionysus. Fusion continued to energize both genres, and we will attend to its effects as we read several tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides and comedies by Aristophanes from fifth-century Athens; a comedy by Menander from the early post-Alexandrian Greek world; comedies by Plautus and Terence from republican Rome; and a tragedy by Seneca from the imperial Rome of Nero. We will also read short selections from (or read about) the genres out of which tragedy and comedy were created and re-created, and into which they sometimes made their own incursions (e.g., heroic epic, women's laments, choral and solo lyric poetry, wisdom poetry, oratory, philosophical texts, histories, mime, farce, various kinds of dance, music and visual arts). We will especially attend to the ways tragedy and comedy inflected one another. Critical readings, along with modern productions of ancient tragedies and comedies, will guide us as we consider all these generic exchanges in light of changing conditions and occasions of theatrical performance, other public spectacles shaping the expectations of theater audiences, and the development of writing and reading as modes of performance. [ more ]

"When we are missing ourselves, we are missing everything." So spoke young Werther in Johann Wolfgang Goethe's groundbreaking novel from 1774. The Sorrows of Young Werther exploded into high Enlightenment Germany, with its emphasis on rationality, on universal human values and on optimism about the future, a bestseller that instead exposed the volatile inner world of an extraordinary individual. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany and Austria, profound interiority surfaced frequently to challenge--and even threaten--what was touted as the triumph of objective, scientific thought. At the same time, the writers and thinkers who explored the deepest recesses of the mind were beset by alienation and despair as they were drawn into inevitable conflict with dominant paradigms. This course will examine literature and thought at the moments when the tectonic plates of reason and supposed unreason converge and collide most forcefully: around 1800 (Goethe, Kleist, and the Romantics), around 1900 (Nietzsche, Freud, Kafka, Hofmannsthal), the mid-twentieth century with its disastrous consequences (Hitler, Boll, Bachmann) and the end of the millennium (Roth, Jelinek). Some theoretical work (psychoanalytic theory, Adorno, Benjamin) will aid in the process of understanding the literature and philosophy we read. All readings and discussion will be in English translation. [ more ]

The aim of this course is to understand literature as a medium intimately related to other media. We shall study contemporary theories of media and intermediality in order to better understand general questions about all art forms and media--but also to be able to specify the medium specific aspects of literature. Theories of intermediality will be the backbone of the course, and a wide variety of examples will be discussed and analyzed. We will begin with the introductory scene of Shrek (Adamson 2001) and move through a handful of example clusters: concrete "visual" poetry, high modernist musical description (short fiction by Mann, Proust, Joyce, Woolf), literary descriptions of visual art (ekphrasis); and Lieder/chansons/rock-lyrics from Schubert to Bob Dylan. We shall also analyze the widespread phenomenon of novel-to-film adaption, exemplified by way of the Beat-poem Howl and the recent film based on the poem and the trial against Allen Ginsberg (Epstein and Friedman 2010). [ more ]

This course is an introduction to Visual Culture with a special focus on photography and its relationship to the construction of memory. Students will read western reflections on the practice and cultural impact of photography by critics such as Barthes, Baudelaire, Baudrillard, Bazin, Benjamin, Berger, Crimp, Derrida, Eco, Flusser, Greenberg, Hirsch, Kemp, Kracauer, Krauss, Metz, Mitchell, Moholy-Nagy, Solomon-Godeau, Sekula, Sontag, and Virilio. Students will supplement the theoretical and conceptual readings by examining photographs and collections of photography and their relationship to the construction of memory--from the personal album to museum collections and historical archives to the collected works of individual artists. Many class sessions will be held at the WCMA and local museums and libraries and students are encouraged to seek out and pursue projects that are meaningful to them. [ more ]

New York is a city that stands apart from the Old World just as it does from the rest of America. As Michel de Certeau put it, it is also a city that "has never learned the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts." And yet its air is thick with history, whose course has always been largely defined by its ever growing immigrant population. This seminar is a journey through more than a century of New York's immigrant culture. It is also a journey across various genres and creative media that have shaped New York's urban culture and myths. We will take as a case study the East European ways of navigating the city, but will also explore the "mappings" of the American metropolis across generations of writers of other ethno-linguistic and cultural backgrounds. We will delve into the gigantic repository of urban impressions that New York imposes upon new arrivals and, through a set of mythopoetic topoi that it generates, try to outline its place in the twentieth-century literary imagination. Topics of discussion will include, though will not be limited to, New York as the gate to the New World, an imagined space and a mental construct, the capitalist "jungle" and intersection of the consumerist and exquisite cultures, an "alternative" America and a version of the Jewish shtetl, a city "driven" by taxicabs and the subway, etc. A special session will be devoted to the artistic representations of 9/11 across immigrant cultures. Primary and secondary readings will be drawn from a variety of authors, including Jean Baudrillard, Michel de Certeau, Maxim Gorky, Federico Garcia Lorca, Franz Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, E.B. White, Paul Auster, Sergei Dovlatov, Junot Diaz and others; screenings will include films by Charlie Chaplin, Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, Joan Micklin Silver, etc. Logistics permitting, we will take a field trip to Ellis Island and New York's Tenement Museum, as well as go on a tour of the city?s historic neighborhoods. [ more ]

Some of the greatest novels are really, really long--so long that they are too seldom read and taught. This course takes time to enjoy the special pleasures of novels of epic scope: the opportunity to immerse oneself in a wide and teeming fictional world; to focus sustained attention on the changeable fortunes of characters and societies over a long span of time; to appreciate the detailed grounding of lives in their social environment and historical moment; to experience the leisurely and urgent rhythms, with their elaborate patterning of build-ups and climaxes, that are possible in such works. We will read but two novels, both preoccupied with the disruption and evolution of lives and loves at moments of historic upheaval: War and Peace (1869), Leo Tolstoy's epic of the Napoleonic Wars, and Parade's End (1924-28), Ford Madox Ford's modernist masterpiece about World War I and its traumatic impact on English social life. Set a century apart, the novels are distinguished by vivid and scrupulous representation of their respective wars, by their shrewd accounts of political and social pressures informing the crises, and by their insight into the struggles of those whose lives are engulfed in global crisis. Tolstoy's and Ford's approaches to fictional representation, however, provide intriguing contrasts: one favors the lucidity of classic realism, the other the challenges of modernist innovation; one deploys a single multiplot novel, the other a tetralogy of shorter novels developing a single plot. We will discuss the differing strategies and effects of these two approaches, as well as the more general difficulties of reading and interpreting long fiction. [ more ]

Jewish culture, like culture in general, is shaped by a variety of encounters between groups. The image of the Sirens--half-birds (or fish)/half-women--serves as a point of departure to other perhaps no less surprising encounters. In this seminar, we shall read texts in English translation from the Hebrew Bible, and especially from the Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity--Talmud and Midrash--as well as later periods, to explore the creative encounters that have shaped Jewish literature and culture. We shall study the continuous presence of Biblical interpretation in Jewish literature, as well as the dialogical exchanges with neighboring cultures, especially the Ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, emerging Christianity, the Mediterranean region, the Moslem and the European civilizations. Throughout our readings, we will explore cultural concepts such as ethnicity, gender, the sacred, social institutions (such as kingship, priesthood and marriage), individuality, and imagination. Our interpretations of a selection of texts will lead to a deeper understanding of the continuous tradition of Hebrew and Jewish literature and culture. [ more ]

Minority artists--writers and visual artists mainly and, to a lesser degree, musicians--face a difficult "double bind" when creating works of art: the expectation is that they, like their racially marked bodies, will exhibit their difference by means of concrete signifiers (details, tropes, narratives, themes) of racial difference. Thus, the work is judged primarily in terms of its embodied sociological content (material, empirical) and not by "abstract" standards of aesthetic subtlety, philosophical sophistication, and so on. At the same time, in the popular and academic imaginary, minority subjects and artists poets occupy a single abstract signifying category--homogeneous, undifferentiated, "other," marginalized, non-universal--while "unmarked" (white) artists occupy the position of being universal and individual at once. The irony, of course, is that, say, an African American poet's being read as an abstract signifier does not mean that the black subject or writer is seen as capable of engaging in abstract ideas. This course will ask questions about the problem of race and abstraction by looking at the work of various writers, visual artists and musicians--including Will Alexander, Cecil Taylor, David Hammons--as well as critics. We will pay particular attention to formally experimental works. [ more ]

In her essay "Peter's Pans: Eating in the Diaspora," literary critic Hortense Spillers argues that "[b]lack writers, whatever their location and by whatever projects and allegiances they are compelled, must retool the language(s) that they inherit" in order to express their experience of blackness. This course considers how this "retool[ing]" of language occurs in African Diasporic literatures of the 20th and 21st centuries, and how new "language(s)" of literary form and genre impact black writers' representations of gender and sexuality. We will focus on writers and filmmakers such as Bessie Head, Zora Neale Hurston, Mariama Ba, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cheryl Dunye, Gwendolyn Brooks, Isaac Julien, Michelle Cliff, Sapphire, Lewis Nkosi, Junot Diaz, and others whose works destabilize conventions of genre, blurring the lines between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. We will examine these texts alongside theories of genre, gender and sexuality offered by Spillers, Michelle Wright, Cheryl Clarke, Judith Butler, Evie Shockley, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others. Through these texts, we will consider how Afrodiasporic writers address questions of gender and sexual identity that arise at various moments in modern African diaspora history, and how "retool[ed]" languages of literature complicate global ideas about black gender and sexuality. This course meets the requirements of the Exploring Diversity Initiative in that it increases students' knowledge of the experiences of people disempowered on the bases of race, gender, and sexuality in a multinational context, and allows them to understand creative expression as a means of interrogating disempowering social structures and ideologies. [ more ]

This course examines the life and works of Fyodor Dostoevsky in the context of Western intellectual history. Readings include Dostoevsky's highly influential novella Notes from Underground, his first major novel Crime and Punishment, and his masterpiece The Brother Karamazov. Over the course of the semester, we will discuss Dostoevsky's age and society, examining the larger trends and problems reflected in his works: the slums of St. Petersburg with their prostitutes, beggars, and moneylenders; widespread demands for social and political reform; psychological, philosophical, and religious debate. All readings will be in English. [ more ]

A study of the origins of the Arthurian story in Welsh history and folklore and a survey of its development and transformations in the romance literature of England and the Continent, from Chretien de Troyes to Thomas Malory, circa 1100-1500. We will pay special attention to the ways in which British/English nationalism, Celtic magic, French courtly love and chivalry, and Christian morality combine and recombine to produce ever new meaning in familiar elements of the plot: Arthur's birth and establishment as king, the fellowship and adventures of his followers, the adulterous love triangle, the Quest for the Holy Grail, and, finally, Arthur's death. [ more ]

To bring the all too familiar everyday to our attention, artists and writers have made it strange. What happens when we view everyday life from elsewhere? While everyday culture has often been experienced as repressive and alienating in modern Western societies, a new importance assigned to everyday life made it liberating in Japan during the twenties and in contemporary China. The contours of the everyday are delightfully vague, and it always exceeds theorizing. For instance, is its privileged place the street or the home? Is it lived largely in institutions that regulate our daily lives, or is it lived between and outside them? Everyday objects and commodities like the potato, the postcard, the car, clothes, housing, etc., will be analyzed. Fiction by Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Georges Perec, Manil Suri, Ha Jin, and Banana Yoshimoto. Films by Chantal Akerman, Pedro Almodovar, Benoit Jaquot, and Pierre Jeunet. Art projects that transform the everyday will also be discussed, including those of Sophie Calle, Mary Kelley, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Christine Hill. Short theoretical excerpts from Freud, Kracauer, Goffman, Lefebvre, de Beauvoir, Friedan, Debord, Foucault, and Bourdieu. All works not originally in English will be read in English translation. [ more ]

In terms of vocabulary and metaphor, the Jewish experience of exile pervades modern, western discourse on the experience of being alienated, severed, and separated from one's national and natural homeland. Thus in this course we will take the Jewish experience of exile (galut) as our point of departure for a broader discussion of these themes as they relate to other diasporic communities. As a consequence of increased mobility, political instabilities, economic insecurity and the proliferation of means of communication, the state of Diaspora increasingly characterizes populations across the globe, from Africa, Asia, South America, and Europe. While we will not focus specifically on these communities, one of our tasks will be to discover how the Jewish experience shapes the discourse on exile and Diaspora that pervades modern discussions of displacement and emigration. We must further consider what is at stake politically and philosophically in privileging the Jewish experience, especially given the post-1948 community of Palestinian refugees. To illuminate this discussion we will draw on the literature of the Jewish tradition from the Hebrew Bible and rabbis to Twentieth Century accounts and reflections of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Emmanuel Levinas, as well as materials that reflect the voices of other refugee communities. We will then move to examine the relationship of the notion of the homeland to that of the promised land. We will consider the ambivalence in the nineteenth and twentieth century concerning discourse of blood and soil, and the consequent possibility that exile and rootlessness could signal positively. [ more ]

This lecture and discussion course focuses on the politics of personal style among U.S. women of color in an era of viral video clips, the 24-hour news cycle, and e-commerce sites dedicated to the dermatological concerns of "minority" females. With a comparative, transnational emphasis on the ways in which gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and class inform standards of beauty, we will examine a variety of materials ranging from documentary films, commercial websites, poetry and sociological case studies to feminist theory. Departing from the assumption that personal aesthetics are intimately tied to issues of power and privilege, we will engage the following questions: What are the everyday functions of personal style among women of color? Is it feasible to assert that an easily identifiable "African-American," "Latina," or "Asian-American" female aesthetic exists? What role do transnational media play in the development and circulation of popular aesthetic forms? How might the belief in personal style as a tactic of resistance challenge traditional understandings of what it means to be a "feminist" in the first place? Readings include works by Julie Bettie, Rosalinda Fregoso, Tiffany M. Gill, Margaret L. Hunter, Linda Leung, Lisa Nakamura, Catherine Ramirez, Felicity Schaefer-Grabiel, and Sandra K. Soto, among others. [ more ]

This course explores how the graphic novel has been an effective, provocative and at times controversial medium for representing racialized histories. Drawing on graphic novels such as Jeremy Love's Bayou and Ho Che Anderson's King: A Comic Biography, this course illustrates and critiques multiple ways the graphic novel commingles word and image to create more sensorial access into ethnic traumas, challenges and interventions in critical moments of resistance throughout history. Students will practice analyzing graphic novels and comic strips, with the help of critical essays, reviews and film; the chosen texts will center on Africana cultures, prompting students to consider how the graphic novel may act as a useful alternate history for marginalized peoples. During the course, students will keep a journal with images, themes and reflections and will use Comic Life software to create their own graphic short stories based on historical and/or autobiographical narratives. This course is part of the Gaudino Danger Initiative. [ more ]

How do we experience and represent time, and what factors might account for both our experiences and our representations? What are some of the ways that people experience and ritually mark the passing of time? What are some of the different ways that people have made sense of time and themselves in time? Especially for individuals and peoples who have been denied certain self-representation and narratives of place, how do competing notions of time, history, space, and location get negotiated? In this course, drawing from within the broad corpus of queer theory (including theorists such as Gloria Anzaldua, Elizabeth Freeman, J. Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Mu?oz) we will examine some non-linear, non-normative, and interruptive approaches to making sense of time, space-time, and self within time. On the one hand, we will consider theorists who specifically question and challenge what Jose Esteban Mu?oz dubs the "linearity of straight time," and we will turn to a set of issues with regard to family and sexuality, especially critiques of normative lifecycle events and rituals that have reconfigured experiences and representations of time and place. On the other hand, we will also work with queer theory as it explores alternatives to normative conceptualizations of time and place that have already existed in the past. Hence we will look not only to queer theory as it reads more contemporary negotiations of sexuality, identity, time, and space-time; we will also consider how some contemporary theorists have read previous historical examples. [ more ]

"Now I wish you to know about the strangest thing ever found anywhere in written texts or in human memory...I tell you that on the right-hand side of the Indies there was an island called California, which was very close to the region of the Earthly Paradise." As far as we know, the name "California" was first written in this passage by Garci Rodriguez de Montalvo, ca. 1510. Within a few decades, it came to be placed first on the peninsula of Baja California and then upon a region stretching up the Western coast of North America. What aspects of this vision are still drawn upon in how we imagine California today? How did certain narratives of California come to be, who has imagined California in certain ways, and why? What is the relationship between certain myths, the peoples who have imagined them, and the other peoples who have shared California dreams? In this course, we will examine some of the myths that surround California by looking at a few specific moments of interaction between the peoples who have come to make California home and the specific places in which they have interacted with each other. Of special interest will be imaginations of the Spanish missions, the Gold Rush, agricultural California, wilderness California, California as "sprawling multicultural dystopia," and California as "west of the west." [ more ]

Ludwig Wittgenstein is commonly cited as one of the central figures in twentieth-century philosophy, and the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell is often seen as one of the century's major philosophical movements. Yet the writing of all these figures remains relatively under-appreciated in literary studies. In this course we will address this shortcoming in two ways. First, we will examine some of the basic claims put forward in ordinary language philosophy, particularly as they compare and contrast with various contemporary literary-theoretical projects. Topics may include meaning and intention (Anscombe, Fish, Derrida, de Man, Michaels); experimental writing (R.M. Berry, Theodor Adorno); gender (Toril Moi, Judith Butler); emotion, affect, and expression (Deleuze, Terada, Leys, Altieri, Eldridge); and animals (Cora Diamond, Cary Wolfe). Most of our time will be spent reading philosophy and theory, but we'll also look at a couple works of literature (a Shakespeare play and a contemporary novel) and a couple films. [ more ]

In this tutorial, we will examine the use of narrative in a range of fine art practices, which could include painting, drawing, video, sculpture, installation, public art, and sound art. Students who are interested in telling or referencing stories in their work in some way will be given the opportunity to develop their ideas and skills in a challenging studio class. In addition to intensive projects, we will look at and discuss the work of artists such as Huma Bhabha, Kara Walker, Joe Sacco, Lydia Davis, Matthew Barney, Raymond Pettibon, Todd Solondz, Sophie Calle, Jenny Holzer, and Jessica Stockholder among others. One of the aims of this course is to challenge traditional notions and expectations of narrative. For instance, what could minimally constitute a narrative piece? How do different mediums allow for time to unfold in unexpected ways? How does omission play a powerful role in a narrative? How might the role of the narrator (often so powerful and present in novels and short stories) change in a visual arts context? [ more ]

The realist novel has a thing for good form: preoccupied with figuring an entire social world in its pages, it also turns a granular-level lens upon the nicer aspects of social life and etiquette. Some literary historians even have pegged the novel's rise to the civilizing process itself. Not just a good read, the novel taught us not to kill each other at the dinner table, and not to use a fish fork to eat our salad. Manners, it turns out, figure some of the most pressing concerns modernity: the nature of social authority amidst increasingly fluid notions of class, the role of taste in the discourse of aesthetics, and the relation of civilization to its discontents. This course will think about the novel's interest in good form, both within fictional worlds and in the novel's sense of itself as becoming something more refined than mass culture as it enters the 20th century. We will read novels alongside work on style and taste, ranging from etiquette books to philosophical writing on aesthetics, as well as sociological theories of taste as an engine of social distinction. How does something as quaint as good manners becomes a means of registering, and contending with, the vicissitudes of modernity in fiction, from the perfection of social form in Oscar Wilde to the tactful reticence of Henry James? While focused on the 19th century, we also will take up one contemporary heir to the novel of manners, American Psycho, in which the desire to keep up appearances becomes a gothic compulsion. Likely novelists include Jane Austen, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Bret Easton Ellis. Theorists will include Pierre Bourdieu, Theodor Adorno, and Erving Goffman, among others. [ more ]

In this class we will investigate the primary approaches to the study of popular expression and identity, with particular emphasis on Latina/o popular music as it relates to questions of gender, sexuality, ethno-racial identity, and the nation. We will focus on the following questions, among others: How is Latina/o identity expressed through the "popular" or the everyday? In which ways does the study of Latina/o popular music and culture in general illuminate our understanding of the diverse Latina/o communities? How are we to interpret marketing phenomenon such as the Latin music "boom"? Employing a broad range of current Cultural Studies theories, methods, and core concepts, students will conduct an original semester-long research project and complete various ethnographic exercises in our analysis of the historical, socio-political, and artistic uses of popular music and culture among Latinas/os. [ more ]

Psychoanalytic thought offers one of the most subtle and startling accounts we have of the nature of gender and sexuality, one that suggests how inextricably sexuality is bound to language, to the limits of culture, and to the problem of identity as such. We'll be interested in these issues in their own right; we'll be equally interested in the surprising ways psychoanalytic thought opens up literary, cinematic and visual works--psychoanalysis is, in the end, a form of reading. The course will weave together theoretical texts and fictions from As You Like It to Some Like it Hot. We'll explore Antigone, "chick flicks" and "buddy" films, courtly love lyrics and novels (Balzac, Woolf, Duras) in the light of thinkers such as Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacqueline Rose, Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman. [ more ]

In the past 25 years, we have seen an extraordinary boom in museum, memorial and monument building around the world. In this class, we will explore what this growth means to cultural practices of memory and global politics. We will explore questions posed by leading scholars in museum and cultural studies such as: Why is there a "global rush to commemorate atrocities" (Paul Williams)? Why do we live in a "voracious museal culture" and how does this impact our ability to imagine the future (Andreas Huyssen)? We look at museum history and recent museum controversies. We will analyze debates surrounding memorials and monuments. In addition to our work on institutions, we will also read a number of novels that claim to do the work of museums (Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence) and that interrupt processes of memorialization (Amy Waldman's The Submission). [ more ]

A close study of one of the most influential and early European novels. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616 C.E) was a hit in its day in the seventeenth century, and has not ceased to influence artists and thinkers since. Moving between humorous and serious tones, Cervantes takes on several issues in the Quixote: the point of fiction in real life, the complications of relationships between men and women, the meaning of madness, the experience of religious co-existence, the shapes of friendship, and the task of literary criticism, just to name a few. We will read the book in a fine modern English-language translation, and set it in several relevant contexts to better understand its original intellectual horizon--seventeenth-century Spain--as well as the reasons for its continuing relevance. [ more ]

This course will consider different kinds of works (poetry, memoirs, fiction, essay) written by authors forced to live in exile as a consequence of political and/or religious persecution. Our point of departure will be the paradigmatic expulsion and subsequent diaspora of the Jews of Spain and Portugal. Most assignments, however, will be drawn from twentieth century texts written during, or in the wake of, the massive destruction and displacements brought about by the Spanish Civil War and World War II. How is the life lost portrayed? How are the concepts of home and the past intertwined? What kind of life or literature are possible for the deracinated survivor? We will discuss the role of writing and remembrance in relation to political history, as well as in the context of individual survival. Readings might include works by Nu?ez de Reinoso, Leon, Cernuda, Semprun, Benjamin, Nancy, and Blanchot. [ more ]

As Gertrude Stein once remarked, "The hardest thing is to know one's present moment." What is going on it today's theatre? What are the hot topics? Who are the writers and directors of our recent past and present moment? This seminar course will consider both experimental and mainstream drama and performance from the past twenty years, focusing on topics such as: auteur-directors, new realism, identity theatre, environmental theatre, performance art, cyber-plays, and the "virtuosic theatre" of the new century. Artists to be considered may include: The Wooster Group, Richard Foreman, Robert Wilson, Edward Albee, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Rachel Rosenthal, Caryl Churchill, Mac Wellman, Tony Kushner, David Henry-Hwang, Suzan-Lori Parks, Sarah Kane, Richard Maxwell, Annie Baker, and others. [ more ]

Critics reading minority writing often focus on its thematic--i.e., sociological--content. Such literature is usually presumed to be inseparable from the "identity"/body of the writer and read as autobiographical, ethnographic, representational, exotic. At the other end of the spectrum, avant-garde writing is seen to concern itself "purely" with formal questions, divorced from the socio-historical (and certainly not sullied by the taint of race). In the critical realm we currently inhabit, in which "race" is opposed to the "avant-garde," an experimental minority writer can indeed seem an oxymoron. In this class we will closely read recent work by Asian American, African American, Native American and Latino/a writers which challenges preconceptions about ethnic literature, avant-garde writing, genre categorization, among other things. The writing done by these mostly young, mostly urban, poets and fiction writers is some of the most exciting being written in the United States today; their texts push the boundaries of aesthetic form while simultaneously engaging questions of culture, politics, and history. Reading them forces us to re-think our received notions about literature. Authors to be read include Will Alexander, Sherwin Bitsui, Monica de la Torre, Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Bhanu Kapil, Tan Lin, Tao Lin, Ed Roberson, James Thomas Stevens, Roberto Tejada, and Edwin Torres. [ more ]

Comparative Literature 300-level independent study. [ more ]

Comparative Literature 300-level independent study. [ more ]

The famous proverb "traduttore, traditore" ("translator, traitor") was coined by angry Italian readers in the Renaissance who felt that French translations of Dante betrayed the accuracy or artistry of the original. However, the long-running debate around the validity of this warning points to a complex system of underlying assumptions and questions about the nature of literary art. Can a translator be faithful to an original text while also appealing to readers in the target language? Is literary translation an act of interpretation, explication, obfuscation, betrayal, or even transmutation? This course will explore the art, theory, and practice of translation from several perspectives. We will examine several key works in the history of translation across a range of eras and cultures, with particular attention to approaches that illuminate the intersection between translation and literary analysis, including short readings by Horace, Jerome, Caxton, Luther, Du Bellay, Dryden, Arnold, Benjamin, Buber, Borges, Jakobson, Nabokov, Steiner, Bassnett, Heaney, and others. At the same time, we will investigate the linguistic, cultural, and literary processes involved in the practice of translation through an ongoing workshop format that will incorporate a series of short exercises and a long-term project. [ more ]

Edward Said (1935-2003), one of the major critics of the last century, is best known for his groundbreaking 1978 book Orientalism, which inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies, and for his activist work on behalf of the Palestinian peoples. But his intellectual interests were wide-ranging: from French literary theory to Vico to Middle East politics to Glenn Gould. A true public intellectual, Said was a rarity among university academics. Besides writing several important scholarly books, he also wrote for various non-academic publications, such as The Nation, Al-Ahram, and The London Review of Books; co-founded, with the musician Daniel Barenboim, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra; and, from 1977-1991, served as a member of the Palestinian National Council. In this course, we will focus on works that represent different, though interconnected, facets of Said's oeuvre: his more strictly literary critical work (Beginnings and The World, The Text, and the Critic), his work on society and culture (Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism), his writings on the Palestinian question and the Middle East (The Question of Palestine, Covering Islam, From Oslo to Iraq), his writings on music (Parallels and Paradoxes co-authored with Daniel Barenboim), and his late work (On Late Style). We will also examine criticism of his work--Orientalism in particular. [ more ]

Comparative Literature senior thesis. [ more ]

Comparative Literature senior thesis. [ more ]

Comparative Literature 400-level independent study. [ more ]

Comparative Literature 400-level independent study. [ more ]